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Announcing TYPO3 CMS 7.3 - More Stability, More Control

The TYPO3 community is pleased to announce the latest version of TYPO3 CMS which serves as another intermediate step towards the final TYPO3 CMS 7 LTS to be released in fall 2015.

Since the release of TYPO3 CMS 7.2 back in April, the team focussed on certain topics under the hood to make the code base simpler and easier to maintain, while providing new standards for setting up new projects made with TYPO3. Read more about the previous releases here. Below you find more in-depth of the changes:

Improved Performance and Stability

Package Manager

The base logic for handling installed extensions and composer packages was backported originally from TYPO3 Flow and used since version 6.2, however most of the logic was never used in the TYPO3 CMS environment. This area was fully cleaned up and slimmed down, requiring less complicated code and less server memory in every Frontend and Backend request, but also act as a more robust solution than ever before.

Composer Class Loader

Loading PHP classes from the filesystem was originally done by a custom functionality introduced in TYPO3 6.2. Earlier this year, the standard functionality from Composer was integrated, but the TYPO3 functionality still acted as fallback for installations not set up through the command line with composer. This has now been streamlined and the “old” class loading functionality was migrated and unified to be using composer, which is only triggered on installation of an extension and is cached separately.

Templating Engine Fluid

Lots of standard view helpers of the rendering engine Fluid were changed to improve performance. This has a positive effect in the backend and leads to significant performance improvements in Extbase extensions. This is a gift to users of the system and developers at the same time since all changes are fully transparent and need no code change in extensions that use Fluid - rendering is just quicker out of the box. In general, working inside the TYPO3 backend feels faster.

More Control

Backend forms

Managing structured content is one of the main goals of TYPO3. Every editor knows the Page module and the List module to access and manipulate content. The main form-based editing was modernized visually while main underlying code structure is years old without being touched on a structural level.
For 7.3, a large work package by Christian Kuhn in the past months has seen first changes which are now part of TYPO3. This mainly affects extension developers who are introducing their own database fields editable by the TYPO3 Backend. Extension developers can now set up and modify the fields to be displayed way easier in their extensions. For more details, see the Documentation part of the new API.

More flexible Fluid templates

Fluid templates can be used for page renderings on a website, and for any content element - triggered by TypoScript and known to integrators. So-called “Data Processors” can now be used to modify any data that Fluid should handle. Read more about this feature in-depth in the documentation.

Backend Inline Editing

The page title can now be edited inline in the Page module and the List module - a first glimpse of more to come in this area.

Command Line Improvements

The widely-acknowledged Symfony Console component is now part of the Command Line Controller from Extbase, allowing more streamlined and flexible output. This is a first step into streamlining the command-line based handling of TYPO3.

Backend Login API

The Backend Login has been changed visually in TYPO3 CMS 7.2, but now the underlying API has been modified to couple external login systems like OpenID in a more flexible way.

In-Depth Material & Download

The full list of changes is perfectly summarized in our What's new slides. The new version can be downloaded on the Download page or via get.typo3.org. Also see the Wiki page for the technical details when upgrading.

Outlook

The team is already working on TYPO3 CMS 7.4, which will finally see the default Content Element Rendering completely based on Fluid, and an even better experience in the TYPO3 Backend Interface. The next release is planned for August 4th, 2015, with a final LTS version to be released in fall 2015.